Two formidable presences lurk over this fascinating book. One is Carl Dahlhaus, whose articulation of a nineteenth-century Stildualismus helped to establish the Beethoven/Rossini paradigm whose centrality to English-language musicology all the contributors take for granted.Footnote ¹ In large part, though, the book is also a response to Richard Taruskin’s foregrounding of that paradigm in his Oxford History of Western Music, in which the Dualismus is provocatively recast as ‘Beethoven vs. Rossini’.Footnote ² According to the acknowledgements, Taruskin not only attended the 2008 Cambridge conference ‘Beethoven and Rossini: Crossing Musical Cultures’ on which The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini is based, but ‘absorbed every paper and delivered the conference’s closing remarks’ (p. xii). Those remarks are unfortunately not included in the book.

Behind the figures already mentioned are their historical antecedents, most notably Raphael Georg Kiesewetter, who first described the early nineteenth century as ‘The Age of Beethoven and Rossini’ in his 1834 history of music, and Stendhal, whose Vie de Rossini of 1824 is an important primary source on the musical attitudes of the time.Footnote ³ Finally, of course, there are Beethoven and Rossini themselves, but one will not learn much from this book about their music per se.

One will learn a great deal, on the other hand, about the historiographical issues that currently preoccupy scholars of that music. One will meet a cast of characters who have helped to define and clarify those issues, including Scott Burnham, Carolyn Abbate, Daniel Chua and others, some of whom, like Burnham, are also contributors to the book. And one will leave with the impression that shifting intellectual currents in our own time are rapidly reshaping our view of the early Romantic period.

The first two sections of the book, titled ‘The Age of Beethoven and Rossini’ and ‘Senses of Place’, focus on the historiography of the early nineteenth century. In the lengthy opening essay, ‘Dahlhaus’s Beethoven-Rossini Stildualismus: Lingering Legacies of the Text-Event Dichotomy’, James Hepokoski, en grand seigneur, gives a sweeping survey of the issues involved. He delineates what he terms four hermeneutic genres through which recent scholarship has renegotiated the dualism, but acknowledges that it may nevertheless seem ineradicable, ‘part of a variant strand of DNA inscribed into the cells of those who have grown up with an attraction to European art music’ (p. 38). Hepokoski urges methodological modesty and catholicity, a willingness to live with the tensions of modern musical scholarship.

Those tensions are certainly visible elsewhere in the book. Hepokoski’s fourth genre, for example, which emphasizes music’s ineffability, is on full display in Nicholas Mathew’s ‘On Being There in 1824’. ‘There’ refers to the first performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the second of which, we are reminded, included Rossini’s ‘Di tanti palpiti’ in place of part of the Missa Solemnis. ‘Being there’ means not just being physically present, but ‘being in the presence of music that inevitably suffered as an export’ (p. 186), as Mathew summarizes Hegel’s reaction to hearing Rossini performed in Vienna at about the same time. ‘Given this background, it is hardly outlandish to suggest that many in the audience would have heard Beethoven’s Ninth through the conventions of opera’ (p. 190). The view of that symphony now in the ascendant is, by these same lights, one in which the Ninth is absent and we are present. Our habit – our compulsion, perhaps – is to bring presence and voice (our own?) to Beethoven the composer and to take it away from Rossini, who Mathew suggests was very much present for Beethoven when he wrote the finale of the Ninth.

Rossini was also very much present for Schopenhauer, as Yael Braunschweig reminds us later in the book in ‘Schopenhauer and Rossinian Universality’. While the view of music set forth in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung was appropriated and given a distinctly German stamp by Wagner, Braunschweig shows that for the philosopher himself Rossini’s melodies were the perfect expression of ‘the stirrings of the will’ through ‘the universal language of music’ (quoted on p. 286). This is not to say that Schopenhauer took sides. Indeed, says Braunschweig, he had no patience for nationalist rhetoric, and his writings lend themselves instead to a very different view of the early nineteenth century in which the dichotomy suggested by this book’s title plays no role. German musical Romanticism, it turns out, had its share of non-German roots.

And what of Italian Romanticism? In ‘Looking North: Carlo Soliva and the Two Styles South of the Alps’, Martin Deasy examines the reception of a unique work, Soliva’s La testa di bronzo, which premiered at La Scala to great success in late 1816. The composer was a recent graduate of the Milan Conservatorio, the German-oriented curriculum of which was unique in Italy at the time, and Deasy sees this opera as an Italian ‘reading’ of the northern symphonic style in operatic terms, characterized by quick transitions and lyricism that is rarely allowed to flower. Rossini responded, in La gazza ladra and other works, with a ‘narcissistic’ take on that same style, ‘appropriating from it those elements he desires, while conserving a sense of his own strong individual artistic identity’ (p. 151). This suggests that the German style might have been mirrored in a variety of yet-unrecognized ways in the works of other Italian composers who also looked northward for inspiration.

The motivation for this book and for the conference that spawned it was, as Mathew and Walton explain in their introductory essay, to allow for the same kind of cross-fertilization to take place between Beethoven specialists and Rossini specialists, challenging ‘disciplinary boundaries [that separate] even those scholars preoccupied by the same part of the nineteenth century’ (p. 5). One need only read through the brief biographical sketches of the contributors to see that, while things did not end up being quite so straightforward, there is still a distinct split between the Germanists and the Italianists, between those who focus on instrumental music and those who prefer opera, with only Mozart and Wagner preventing the two groups from being nearly identical. (Hepokoski is an exception, but his Verdi scholarship is not specifically mentioned.)

Nevertheless, there is a distinct gravitational pull in much of this book, with even the Beethoven scholars promoting a less exalted, less ‘heroic’ view of their subject than that still commonly encountered elsewhere. Their views harmonize with those of the Italianists more often than not, as is particularly evident in the third section, titled ‘Rehearings’. In his essay on Rossinian repetitions, Emanuele Senici laments that ‘there seems not to be any way out of “Beethoven”’ (p. 238), and then proceeds to address that problem through careful elaboration of his topic. Reaching in the other direction, Mary Ann Smart says in ‘Prometheus and his Creatures in Vienna and Milan’ that Beethoven could have been understood differently in Italy if not for the highly charged political atmosphere that shaped music criticism during the years of Habsburg domination. And in ‘Making Overtures’, Scott Burnham, whose views inform those of both Senici and Smart, states that ‘the prevailing historiography of these two composers is the greatest, most sustained Rossini crescendo of them all … Perhaps our present confabulations will nudge us closer to the end of this overture, so that we can get on with the rest of the opera’ (p. 208).

Burnham’s ‘overture’ might be described as a lively tango in which Beethoven and Rossini gyrate together in mutually reinforcing stereotypes, with Beethoven providing the intellectual weight and Rossini the fun. What follows an overture, though, is a theatrical curtain rise, and ‘the rest of the opera’ that Burnham imagines will clearly not be a work of absolute music. Indeed, Gundula Kreuzer, in ‘Heilige Trias, Stildualismus, Beethoven’, suggests that we could easily reformulate the early nineteenth century as the ‘age of opera’ (p. 85), with Vienna only one location among many and Weber and Spontini the hinge of the most important conflict of the 1820s (as Adolf Bernhard Marx believed they were), followed by the epoch of Meyerbeer in the next two decades. This would have the advantage of bringing France firmly into the picture, as well as establishing that there are multiple ways of telling the story in which all the composers just mentioned played a part. And, of course, it would bring Beethoven down to size, and along with him the assumed centrality of instrumental music in the history of early Romanticism.

Meanwhile, Suzannah Clark, in ‘Rossini and Beethoven in the Reception of Schubert’, seeks to reconfigure the duality in a different way. Analyzing Schubert’s E-flat major impromptu, with its B section in the distantly related key of B minor, Clark challenges the idea of a ‘drastic’ view of Schubert (to use Carolyn Abbate’s term), suggesting that even though Schubert’s music doesn’t play by the Beethovenian rules – or perhaps because it doesn’t – simply ‘being there’ is not sufficient to absorb its full impact. ‘Who has been to a magic show and not wondered how it was done?’ (p. 113).

The fourth and final section of the book, ‘Crossing Musical Cultures’, places the Beethoven–Rossini duality in a broader historical context. Julian Johnson’s ‘Very Much of this World: Beethoven, Rossini, and the Historiography of Modernity’ demonstrates that Beethoven’s late style – especially if one traces its origins to the works written around the Congress of Vienna – punctuates the familiar markers of musical transcendence with appeals to the popular, often interrupting the logic of development with moments of disjunctive bathos. (Examples are the ‘Bitte um innern und äußern Frieden’ in the Agnus Dei of the Missa Solemnis and no. 22 of the ‘Diabelli’ variations, which disrupts a series of ‘ennobling’ treatments of Diabelli’s ‘Schusterfleck’ with a lowbrow spoof of the opening of Don Giovanni.) The later Beethoven contained the Dualismus within himself, and this seemingly obvious fact has only come to seem problematic because a limited, and limiting, idea of modernism has often obscured the very modern irony that both Beethoven and Rossini seem to have relished. In this view, both composers belong to our time, broadly defined, in a way that earlier composers do not.

In ‘Elements of Disorder: Appealing Beethoven vs. Rossini’, John Deathridge provides a witty reflection on universalism, national identity, beasts, Beatles and burials, in which the re-interment of both composers in the later nineteenth century is shown to add new twists to the complexities of their lives. The peripatetic Beethoven migrated once again to a cemetery that was ‘central’, while the expatriate Rossini was reclaimed by his native land. Meanwhile, Richard Will’s ‘Role Reversal: Rossini and Beethoven in Early Biopics’ reminds us that, ‘secure as it may seem in professional music history and criticism, in other quarters the opposition between Beethoven and Rossini may already have been deconstructed [in the 1930s and 1940s], after a fashion, or never accorded much status in the first place’ (p. 349). As Will demonstrates, Mario Bonnard’s film Rossini conveys a heroic view of its subject and a sense that he was writing for posterity rather than for performers, while Abel Gance’s Un Grand Amour de Beethoven grants Beethoven’s music the kind of immediate presence that is often associated with Rossini. The usual takes on these composers, in other words, were turned on their heads in films from the early twentieth century, and the result could still be liberating.

Despite the complexity of some of the issues presented, most of the contributions to The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini are highly readable, conveying a sense of the intellectual liveliness that must have made the ‘Crossing Musical Cultures’ conference a vibrant event. The book is beautifully produced, with wide margins and, when needed, copious black and white illustrations and music examples. The citations appear at the end of each essay rather than at the end of the book, giving it a journal-like feel and making it much easier to toggle between citations and text. The book would have benefitted, though, from a thorough subject index; it has what appears to be a name-only index that inexplicably includes a handful of subjects – Congress of Vienna, Fantasia (film), Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Risorgimento – while omitting many others that would have been equally, if not more, important. Many key names, like Kiesewetter and Mozart, should have been given with subheadings instead of being followed by long lists of page numbers without further distinction. A book of this complexity that retails for $120 should have a more thorough and more systematic index.